This article is excerpted from What Love Is: The Letters of 1, 2, and 3 John by Kelly Minter.
Recently when I ran into a friend and asked the normal "How are you?" She gave me an honest response. She told me she'd just had a really hard conversation with her husband and how painful it was and how God was working in their marriage. Can I tell you that this was the most refreshing 25 minutes of my weekend? A fellow believer was honest with me, which helped me be honest with her. As a result I believe we had fellowship. You'd go to church for this, I promise.
We forget that the Christian life is about our fellowship with a living Person, Jesus. When He's active in our lives and in the lives of others we'll have endless things to talk, dream, and pray about. We'll have fellowship, and fellowship will lead to joy. No fleeting pleasure compares to the joy that comes from fellowship-even fellowship in the midst of suffering. When Jesus is in our midst and we're joined together with Him and with one another, the common bond of our Savior ignites heart-bursting joy.
If our fellowship with the Lord and other believers is stale we'll tend to become judgmental, draw harsh lines, or go the opposite way and dismiss the need for fellowship altogether. But if we're communing with the Lord on a regular basis, we won't be able to help our desire to invite others into the community of believers. While I want us to be deeply grateful for our invitation into the fellowship of believers, I want us to be equally passionate about inviting others into that fellowship.
With the advent of social media and the Internet we're in danger of replacing fellowship for something that is merely a shadow of the real thing. We can download a sermon instead of sitting next to someone on a Sunday morning, we can email a prayer instead of physically enfolding another hand in our own, tweets and posts can be our manna instead of communing with God in His Word. Let's push out of our private worlds and embrace the very gift John gives us as his reason for writing: the glory of fellowship.
The themes of this study include fellowship, light, assurance, abiding, obedience, and love. Read the first session of What Love Is for FREE.
WATCH a sample teaching session by Kelly Minter:
The letters of 1, 2, & 3 John were written to encourage followers of Jesus to remain faithful to the truth. Believers are challenged to look at contrasting themes such as walking in the light instead of darkness, truth versus lies and deception, loving God more than loving the world, and the meaning of true fellowship and community rather than shallowness. This study reveals not only the heart of John but also the heart of Jesus.